Crash kills young Central Queensland footballer

A PROMISING young Central Queensland football player is dead and three others injured after a single-vehicle crash at Lotus Creek, south of Mackay.

Yesterday, friends and family of Nathan Moffatt mourned the popular 18-year-old, who was on a camping trip at Twin Bridges when the accident happened late Saturday night.

Police said the Middlemount man was a passenger in a four-wheel drive travelling along the Lotus Creek-Dysart Rd when it rolled about 11.45pm, also injuring two 19-year-old men and a 19-year-old woman.

The Queensland Ambulance Service said they took one man and the woman to Middlemount Hospital, the woman with a possible spinal injury.

Friends and family are mourning the loss of Nathan Moffatt, 18, who died after a vehicle rollover on Saturday night.

The RACQ-CQ Rescue helicopter flew the other man to Mackay Base Hospital in a stable condition with suspected head injuries.

The crash happened on a dirt road approximately 169km south of Mackay.

The four-wheel drive was travelling in a group with two other vehicles at the time.

A friend who was not involved in the crash drove to the Lotus Creek Service Station, which Sandy Petrie owns and operates, to raise the alarm.

Mr Petrie called the police and ambulance crews for him but had to drive out to the crash site himself to give the emergency services directions.

"It's tragic, it's something that shouldn't have happened," he said.

The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating the cause.

Yesterday tributes flowed for Nathan, who was being remembered by Facebook friends as a "legend on the field" and a fantastic bloke.

The Middlemount man had been named in the Villa Capri CQ Capras Under-21s for 2015, and coach Lionel Harbin said news of the crash came as a shock.

"He was very enthusiastic about joining the Capras, he was really looking forward to it," he said.

"He was very talented.

"He was only small in stature, but he played bigger than what he was."